The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This is part one of a trilogy that threatens to knock Henning Mankell off his crime writer's throne. And no bad thing either. I know it's heresy to criticise Mankell, especially now we know he was pretty much all Seamus Heaney read while convalescing recently, but are Swedish cops really as depressed as Kurt Wallander? And how many more psychopathic killers can there be in the Scandinavian equivalent of Godalming? Larsson's take on crime is refreshingly different. There are no cops. There's a campaigning journalist called Mikael Blonkvist, who lays women as casually as he drinks coffee (he drinks a lot of coffee), and his punk sidekick Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title. She's young, intelligent, tough, a whizz at hacking into computers and a rottweiler with men who take advantage of her apparent vulnerability. They are hired by a millionaire industrialist living on a remote island, ostensibly to write his biography but in fact to solve the 40-year-old mystery of his missing niece. Are the flowers he is sent each year on her birthday from her murderer? I skipped the really gory bits and am waiting impatiently for part two, where, DV, Lisbeth will be luckier in love.